‘Like a drag or something’: an introduction

She danced freely and happily to Beyoncé's ‘Crazy in Love’ in Sultan Bello Hall, to the delight of an accepting audience before she was ever called woman. As JP – one of the contributors to She Called Me Woman (SCMW) – narrates, this performance was a defining moment in her journey towards becoming a woman. Sultan Bello Hall is a historically male hostel in the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. The narrator here, who lived in the hall as a male student, had featured in a competition where men cross-dressed as women and competed for the title ‘Ms Bello’. According to JP, this was not seen as some underground transgression involving perverse boys; rather, it was a proper social event, validated by the large attendance of students from different halls across the campus and the occasional attendance by the university's vice chancellor. Men would dress up like women – dresses, heels, makeup – and the person with the best ‘woman act’ emerged as the winner. The narrative offers no specific timeline, although there is a passing reference to events that happened in 2009. Thus, all that can be gathered from the text is that, before 2009, Sultan Bello Hall had hosted drag contests without labelling or ridiculing them.

The context of the publication of SCMW is one in which the Nigerian state has enacted a restrictive law that imposes limitations yet also assumes that the queer subject is knowable and criminalizable. My focus on this book, taking the context of the law as a given, relates to the ways in which queer women in Nigeria negotiate imposed political and social categories and boundaries and query their assumptions. The first – and perhaps the more obvious – point here is the changing discursive landscape of sexual practices in Nigeria. My aim is not to ask the long-standing question of whether or what sexual identities exist or existed in this space, specifically as one functioning as a microcosm for Africa. Such a question, to echo Macharia (Reference Macharia2018), may simply be ‘colonial fixing’. Rather, I am interested in the politics of naming and un-naming sexual practices, how this produces fields of knowledge in which queer subjects are knowable, and how, in turn, queer lives negotiate new frontiers. By colonial fixing, Macharia refers to the imposition of Western-originated, and now global, identitarian categories and the search for problematic equivalences between the LGBT+ discourse and queer experiences in Africa. Because it is largely preoccupied with mobilizing identity-fixing categories to negotiate the sexual rights of citizens, LGBT+ discourse often obscures the fluidity in other cultural landscapes, experiences that cannot be boxed up into identitarian categories. Sexuality is broadly produced in a regime of knowledge that enables new claims to intimacy while effacing others (Gunkel Reference Gunkel2009). The identification of sexuality within Western understandings has had a long colonial history in Africa, where sexuality has served as an important domain to separate citizens from subjects, the modern from the uncivilized (Tamale Reference Tamale and Tamale2011). While the abstractions of the LGBT+ discourse have been useful in sexual rights advocacy, they are also driven by international norms and within Western frameworks of citizenship that replicate colonial knowledge systems and efface local particularities and experiences (Hoad Reference Hoad2007; Macharia Reference Macharia2018; Nyeck Reference Nyeck, Corrêa, de la Dehesa and Parker2014).

Against these limits, I introduce SCMW as a text that reflects the fluid experiences that make up queer life in Nigeria and how these go beyond the LGBT+ framework. One of the narrators, TQ, notes: ‘I wouldn't put a word on my identity. It's just something I do’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 44). Similarly, the narrator JP describes the contests explored in the opening paragraph of this article as ‘like a drag or something’ (ibid.: 25). TQ's emphasis on ‘doing’ and JP's phrase ‘or something’ leads me directly to my second and broader point. ‘Or something’ – to suggest an unspecified/unspecifiable alternative – is a pointer to the open-endedness of practices and lived experiences more generally. Drawing inspiration from this fluidity indexed by the narratives of women, I intend to unravel ways in which we can – perhaps must – read and learn from ‘or something’ in the queer experiences in Africa. In spite of the patriarchal and heteronormative settings of these landscapes in Nigeria, the lives of the women in SCMW subsist on creative navigations – a way for queer women to ‘contest taken-for-granted and often institutionalised and bounded ideas and practices of being, becoming, belonging, places and spaces’ (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2017: 258). It is important to prioritize the stories and nuances of social life as constitutive of the texture of critical margins and being, or ‘frontier Africans’, as Nyamnjoh would put it. Nyamnjoh draws from Amos Tutuola's representation of African universes in his book The Palm-wine Drinkard, where worlds and experiences are always intersecting and changing, to argue that Africans are ‘frontier beings’ (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2017: 258). He uses the term ‘frontier’ to conceptualize the creative navigations of Africans through situations and contexts and to characterize the flexibility of African lives and experiences. He argues that frontier Africans are incomplete, where incompleteness indexes not a lack of but open-ended possibilities. Nyamnjoh's exploration of frontier Africans provides a useful tool for thinking with the flexibility represented in SCMW and as indexed in JP's ‘or something’ – not as limitations of queer lives but as the way in which limitations and possibilities go hand in hand.

Following Nyamnjoh, ‘queer frontiers’ is considered as a way to think with the creative motions of life across African landscapes, the capacity to adapt to different environments and the affordances of everyday life within patriarchal and heteronormative institutions in ways that cannot be permanently fixed. In this vein, I situate She Called Me Woman within the broader frame of the proliferation of queer writing in Nigeria since the 2014 Same-Sex Marriage (Prohibition) Act (SSMPA). These texts emerge on platforms such as blogs and have played a significant role in projecting queer narratives. However, they also tend to exclude others, by reiterating and normalizing certain modes of being. This article thus explores SCMW's potential as an anthology of narratives to render palpable open-ended queer imagination and capacity to flexibly adapt to different contexts and circumstances. The book serves as the prime data for this article. It comprises twenty-five stories, one by each narrator. Although I do not reference all twenty-five stories, I move between a few exemplars to analyse the subjectivity of experience that these different narrations reflect.

Specifically, I examine how the social circumstances and environments of the women intersect with their own resolves and articulations of self, and how this interplay produces complex and nuanced lives and experiences. This relational reading is crucial if we are to expand the thematic boundaries of how we define queer (Nyanzi Reference Nyanzi and Matebeni2014). The editors of SCMW use the term ‘queer’ as an index for the multiple narratives collected that show a wide spectrum of experiences and often contradictory positions towards gender and sexuality in Nigeria. I use ‘queer’ conceptually to reflect on the dynamism of sexual life as revealed by these stories but also to map the diversity of the lives of queer Nigerians and the intersection of queerness as a sexual-cum-gendered form with other experiences of being Nigerian – social inequality, family, religion, work. I argue that being queer in Nigeria is marked by multiplicity and nuances because its experiences are varied and always intersecting with other experiences. Thus, the idea of queer is taken up here as a frontier for being, doing and thinking that must be read elliptically.

In the sections that follow, I present, first, the modalities of queer writing in Nigeria since the passing of the SSMPA, showing how emergent texts have worked counter-discursively. The subsequent section offers a reading of SCMW, examining the ways in which the texts represent the nuances of the lives of queer women across Nigeria. I further examine how nuances can also be mapped discursively and be mobilized as a site of resistance in the experiences of sexual life in Africa. In the final section, I take up the dominant politics of identification in queer discourse as exclusionary of the realities of queer frontiers in Nigeria to suggest the need for new names that would better express the ‘creative navigations’ (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2017: 258) of queer frontiers in Nigeria.

Queer writing in Nigeria: from SSMPA to SCMW

I situate SCMW within the emergent trajectories of queer writing since the passing of the SSMPA. While cultural and social responses to homosexuality before the law tended to be multiple and complex, sometimes accepting and sometimes apprehensive, the law institutionalized social angst and enabled its propagation, rendering formerly nuanced or negligible practices knowable in problematic ways (Gaudio Reference Gaudio2009; Pierce Reference Pierce2016). The mobilization of the law to institute ideals of morality, particularly through the codification of sexual practice, is hardly new in the Nigerian state. As scholars have shown, the implementation of sexuality laws enables the enfolding of intimate life into the making of the state and to facilitate its social reproduction (Aderinto Reference Aderinto2014; Oguntola-Laguda and van Klinken Reference Oguntola-Laguda, van Klinken, van Klinken and Chitando2016). In relation to the question of homosexuality, the law has been mobilized towards ideals of postcolonial citizenship within imaginaries that are resonant with colonial ideas of the civilized-cum-modern subject (Ndjio Reference Ndjio2012). As Ekine (Reference Ekine, Ekine and Abbas2013: 81) put it, ‘heterosexuality is consolidated as the only acceptable basis for citizenship’. While earlier laws have focused on the regulation of private sexual life, the SSMPA and similar laws in other African countries demonstrate a new investment in queer sociality by focusing not simply on the practice of sex but also on social organizing (Nyeck Reference Nyeck2016; Oguntola-Laguda and van Klinken Reference Oguntola-Laguda, van Klinken, van Klinken and Chitando2016). This new investment in the social life of queer people has introduced a new, now official, barrier to the expression of queer life in Nigeria, foreclosing the social possibilities that people previously negotiated in the country. In Nyeck's (Reference Nyeck2016) reading of the recent laws, specifically as they are mobilized against social organizing, she notes that they are often regarded as generative of religious and cultural expectations within contemporary African societies, but they foreclose social relations in ways that contradict the very fluid and nuanced nature of African religious and social experience. The SSMPA thus generates a ‘political logic’ that seeks to ‘treat citizens as finite rational beings whose behaviour is interpreted through scrutinizing logical facts’ (ibid.: 94). Such a treatment distorts the openness of African socio-cultural landscapes to fluidity and presupposes the complete knowability of beings.

Despite, or because of, the social repression that the law codifies, queer writing has grown in popularity, allowing for the re-inscription of queer sociality through texts. Queer texts have thus also become a medium for the production of knowledge about queer subjects. The law did not just draw reactions from already established writers (Soyinka Reference Soyinka2012; Adichie Reference Adichie2014); it also triggered queer writing by everyday queer people themselves. As Munro (Reference Munro2017) rightly notes, the Nigerian government probably did not anticipate the extent to which its bill would be a major provocation for the emergence of queer discourse, which occurred through activism and art and was particularly visible in both traditional and non-traditional literature. New media have also played an important role in this regard. Because of their relative accessibility and anonymity, online platforms in particular have become spaces that queer people use to represent their desires. Some of this writing may be seen on social media networks but it also exists in written online forms such as blogs.

While constitutive of counter-discourse vis-à-vis homophobia, many of these texts articulate the assumption of fully knowable queer subjects. The blog, Kito Diaries, for instance, is dedicated to telling queer stories. Emerging shortly after the passing of the SSMPA, it was soon dubbed the Nigerian LGBT community online. Kito Diaries adopts its name kito from Nigerian queer slang, where it refers to the forceful outing of queer persons, usually gay men. In an introduction to the blog, the editor describes it as a space ‘where we can tell our stories for all and sundry to read and still remain incognito and away from prying eyes’.Footnote ¹ The blog provides content about perpetrators of violence (kito) against queer Nigerians and how to avoid them, while also supplying a platform for people to share their stories under pseudonyms and pose questions to the virtual community. Yet since its inception, the blog has continued to be largely populated by content written by educated self-identifying gay men and mediated with language such as ‘kito’ pertaining to the experiences of men (Oloruntoba-Oju Reference Oloruntoba-Oju2020). Thus, while Kito Diaries has offered a safe space for many to find recognition and community, it continues to produce discourses that privilege ‘limited, unilinear approaches which tend to reinforce basic assumptions about the nature of social categories’ (Pincheon Reference Pincheon2000: 40). The Kito Diaries example demonstrates that, while counter-discourses of queer living in Nigeria have emerged as a textual form since the SSMPA, these texts have also largely privileged particular kinds of subjects, often the urban, literate and middle/upper class, who often employ the frameworks of recognition derived from the global LGBT+ discourse.

Against the background of such texts, SCMW offers a pioneering perspective by calling into question the reality that queer women ‘are often missing and outside the frame even in conversations about queerness, dominated as they are by queer men's experiences’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 3). It demonstrates through the lives of queer Nigerian women that – in the narrator, CG's, phrasing – ‘there is no one way to be a woman’ (ibid.: 254). The presentation of the narratives of women who differ vastly in experience allows us to further trouble the categories through which we understand queer narratives. The women come from different cultural backgrounds and socio-economic conditions; some of them live in areas of ethnic and religious conflict; some are wealthy and have relatively more choices than others; some maintain their ties with heterosexual relationships, and so on. In many ways, SCMW constitutes an interesting, if partial, representation of the nuanced socialities that could contribute to queer discourse in important ways – forms of sociality that laws such as the SSMPA seek to foreclose. I thus examine the conditions in which queer lives take shape and the limits of fixed dominant categories as signifiers of these lives. This article looks towards Keguro Macharia's exasperated proclamation: ‘The thing that I am has no name. At least not in the language of my people’ (cited in Musangi Reference Musangi and Matebeni2014: 53). And it asks: to what extent are African queer lives, vague as they are, knowable in the available idioms that are often fixed in global paradigms? In what creative ways do these queer women negotiate attachments, boundaries and desires as frontier beings, regardless of the confines imposed by categories of law and global sexuality discourses? In what way does this offer important insight into the ways we can theorize queering Africa beyond the West?

Everyday queering experiences in She Called Me Woman

Taken together, the stories narrated in SCMW reflect the diversity of queer lives in Nigeria. The experiences of queer women here are contingent on geographical and social factors, capable of taking personal and unexpected turns, and, as such, they cannot be simply taken for granted as known. In writing about the homoerotic economy in Kinshasa, Hendriks succinctly describes such an economy as ‘an extant and imaginary network of interrelated subject positions that are libidinally invested and entangled in the usually unspoken homoerotic affordances of everyday urban life that largely exceed actual sexual contact and resonate with broader societal changes producing their own dynamics of desire’ (Reference Hendriks2016: 232, emphasis added). The point being made here about the ways in which the experience of sexuality is generative within broader figurations of social life and change is a crucial frame for examining the non-fixity of queering practices in Nigeria. The fact that ‘dynamics of desire’ can be constantly ‘produced’ in space and time suggests that we cannot fully know them, and it is precisely this unknowability of the currency of productive desire that I explore here.

Queer lives across Nigeria: spatio-temporalities of She Called Me Woman

This section explores stories from different regions in Nigeria to underscore the geographical subjectivities that mark queer relations. Spatial and temporal factors shape even the nature of the constraints imposed on queer life, and, as such, the ways in which people negotiate these possibilities unfold in varied ways from context to context. In Keguro Macharia's important essay ‘On being area studied’, he reflects on the complexity of identification for the black race in and beyond Africa. Drawing from Katherine McKittrick's term, he speaks of ‘an ungeography called Africa’ (Macharia Reference Macharia2016: 186). The idea of an ‘ungeography’ is precariously set and real in Nigeria, where there is so much diversity in terms of cultural aspirations and religious life, whose presence is partly explained by the colonial imposition that created the foundation for the current geographical space called Nigeria. The diversity and complexity of everyday life in Nigeria become pertinent fields of inquiry if we are to query the assumptions through which queer subjects are made known by law and global discourses. The diverse experiences narrated in SCMW become new frontiers for studying queer life.

The contributors, depending on the affordances of their different contexts, straddle the known and unknown ways of queer life. Some of the women find it useful to adopt the emergent categories of global sexuality discourse, while others reject or strategically evade them. In her story, ‘Living a double life’, VA reflects on her struggles, living as a lesbian in Lagos. Noting the great difficulty with which she has had to hide her sexuality from a lot of people around her, she laments the troubles of ‘living a double life’. In spite of the tough internal struggles of anxiety and the filial burden of procreation within the normative heterosexual family construct, at the age of thirty-five VA recognizes, quite crucially, her ability to have the sexual experiences that she wants. She notes: ‘It's only now that I'm able to understand that I have choices. I can choose. It's normal. I've attended programmes for LGBT people. I made friends who know about my sexuality. That is what has made the difference’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 149). Her declaration about finding choice and identification in her community is instructive. It points to the manner in which her space (by this, I also mean the time in which it is occurring) has informed her experiences and enabled her to identify with specific logics of queer discourse. In the urban-cosmopolitan context of Lagos, VA finds herself able to ‘think less about the burden of secrecy’ (ibid.: 156). In the same city, however, KZ (age forty) argues that secrecy is important in the Nigerian context. She narrates her discomfort with the emerging trend of open identification as queer among young people in Lagos. ‘Back then,’ she notes, ‘we didn't know if it was the in thing; it was our life’ (ibid.: 280). Thus, while she recognizes the emergent forms of queer identification and possibilities of community in the cosmopolitan environment that VA narrates, she remains critical of what it really represents. She equates it with a problematic exhibitionism that is inappropriate for the lived experiences of everyday Nigerians, which she argues continue to be marked by social inequalities and crisis regardless of sexual orientation. Her critique of this era of queer expression in the city is therefore also an overall critique of Nigeria and its value in the lives of its people. She notes: ‘[Y]ou have no rights as a human being in this country. When you report issues to the police, you will be the one to pay them. Why should we fight? There is a subtle way we have been doing it. Let that subtle way continue’ (ibid.: 282).

In other spaces, the experiences of queer women are even more precarious and as such productive of new frontiers of imagining and living queer life that do not depend on the fluencies of queer discourse that are emerging in places such as Lagos. In a case from Zamfara in the north, for instance, QM's story, ‘I only admire girls’, reflects experiences that play out quite differently. Even when her sexual proclivities are rather similar to VA's and KZ's, QM's experiences differ largely owing to her context. She sums up her condition thus: ‘As girls from Hausaland, we lacked rights. You don't have rights to do anything until your parents say. When you get married, you still don't have rights unless your husband says so’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 57). In Gaudio's (Reference Gaudio2009) work on sexual minorities in northern Nigeria, he notes the ways in which economic factors and state institutions whose moral codes were established along Islamic lines by Sharia law impacted the lives of sexual minorities, and how women were particularly affected by these issues. QM's narration of her ordeal as a woman living in northern Nigeria reflects the reality addressed in Gaudio's work. The lack of choices – the kind that VA has – means that QM adapts her desires to the expectations of her own environment. She recounts how she was forced to marry as a teenager and had to live as a wife for three years, before she ran away and could break free. Even in her new environment, however, QM finds that she is still confronted with similar constrictions from conservative sexist regulations under which women like her are routinely criminalized and punished. On account of these constraints, she resorts to homosocial arrangements where, in her own words, ‘my friends and I support each other and sometimes we talk. I am not so close to them. I just try to hide myself. I do not want to be in a situation where I will involve anyone in trouble’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 64). Her desires are not sexually invested because they must not be for her to survive the social conditions of her environment.

The premium QM puts on discretion again shows that knowledge of queer lives cannot simply be assumed a priori. By articulating the need and expectation to ‘hide’ herself, QM underscores the imperative of discretion in her social environment. In a similar sense to KZ, QM understands the appropriateness of discretion in her environment. Unlike KZ, however, QM's discretion is not represented in her narration as a choice between an old way and a new way of doing queer. As scholars have noted, the enactment of discretion in sexual life does not necessarily carry a negative valence but points to its own socio-cultural logic of what constitutes respectable talk and what does not (Dankwa Reference Dankwa2009; Gaudio Reference Gaudio2009). Gaudio (ibid.) has noted that the Anglo-American realization of ‘coming out’ as a progressive politics does not hold as much meaning in the socio-cultural context of northern Nigeria. In contrast to the verbal articulation of identity imbued in ‘coming out’ as emphasized in Anglo-American settings, here actions are negotiated along a terrain of discretion. In QM's case, discretion becomes an appropriate mechanism to retain the unknowability of her sexual desires in her socio-cultural context.

The interaction between the examples of these women, then, shows how queer women navigate the frontiers of queer life by negotiating expectations, places and even terms or modes of self-representation. How should we think queer life in a way that acknowledges the particularities or paradoxes of the narrated experiences? Is QM as much a lesbian as VA, or is she better represented by the description ‘I only admire girls’? How might we think about the grey areas between VA's self-identification in an urban environment or KZ's critique of and refusal to participate in the emergent queer politics of the same space and QM's strategic discretion in her religious and cultural space? It might be more useful to think of KZ's and QM's lived experiences as depicted through the narration within the unspecifiable framework of ‘or something’ offered by JP in the introduction to this article. As another contributor, quoted above, notes: ‘[T]hey have so little in common.’ The experiences of these women differ spatially, socially, economically and culturally. Thus, in view of this minimal commonality, what are the consequences of categorizing them under the same frame as Nigerian law and the global acronym would? The different spatio-temporal circumstances of these women produce diverging dynamics of desire. While this example draws specifically on northern–south-western difference, it is not to suggest that this is the only, or even the most important, sense in which social conditions shape modes of doing sexuality. Rather, it shows that sexuality does not exist outside the frame of its social production, and it is important to note that the ways in which these conditions occur are open-ended and in constant motion, as JP articulates in the opening vignette.

‘Everything about love died the day he died’: individual experiences of queer life

Beyond the broader socio-cultural variance that nuances queer experiences, queer lives, as narrated in SCMW, have the capacity to take unexpected personal turns. Individual aspirations and losses in everyday life are always interconnected with the ways in which people experience and negotiate queer frontiers. Here, I draw on AG's story to show how her experience shapes her experiences of desire. In her story, ‘Everybody in J-town is now a lola’, AG narrates her sexual experiences within the broader framework of the libidinal or erotic economy (Bennett Reference Bennett2016; Hancock Reference Hancock2017) in J-town (slang used by the author to refer to Jos, the state capital of Plateau State). Her deployment of ‘now’ suggests the sense in which the landscape of sexual relations has the capacity to change. What AG suggests here is that more people have become lolas (the term lola is also slang, used by the author to describe women who are sexually intimate with other women). For some, as AG describes, ‘now’ is framed commercially in order to be able to benefit from sex transactions. She narrates: ‘But some of them go into this for the absurd reasons. These days, it pays – sugar mummies, you know. Even the street girls – if you're coming with money, they'll do it’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 166).

AG's narration gives a sense of queer life that is dynamic and even contradictory. The intentions and claims of ‘lolas’ are unfixed and changing such that we cannot fully know them. Conditions keep changing and experiences of sexual life with them. Beyond the general social factors, such as the economic one, that AG ascribes to queer life in Jos, she also talks about how her individual experiences framed her sexual and intimate life. She recounts that the first big love experience she had was with a man. At fifteen, she fell in love with a twenty-three-year-old man, whom she would have married. Her only male lover, however, was killed during the Jos crisis. She recounts: ‘He was driving past Bauchi Road. They slaughtered him in his car. His sister called me and I went to the mortuary. I needed to see him. What I saw, I can't erase. I didn't love any guy again. Everything about love died the day he died’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 161).

This touching account of loss reified by the sight of her lover's maimed body forms an important part of and context to AG's queering experience. As her account of the incident reflects, this was a loss that changed her and her attitude to love and her choice of partners. She notes how, in the period that followed, her loss made her become ‘very wild’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 161). AG describes her wildness as having multiple partners at the same time and she ascribes this to the lack of love in her heart at the time (ibid.: 161). This phase of unbridled desire for sex, however, came to an end when she met and fell in love with C. C had never been in a same-sex relationship and was apprehensive at first, but she learned to love AG (ibid.: 164). C's responsiveness to AG's love and her ability to learn same-sex love echoes the notion in Dankwa (Reference Dankwa2009) of people capable of being initiated into sexual practice. Thinking of it through this lens, sexuality is not necessarily something that someone has without question or something that can be fixed, like a noun; rather, it is something one does and experiences, like a verb. In describing how one of her interlocutors in Ghana thinks of sexuality as something that can be learned, Dankwa notes:

Like Ameley, who is described in Dankwa's work, AG in SCMW is able to share love with another woman, C, who had never experienced same-sex love until she encountered AG, but who was open to the possibility of learning to love in that way.

As frontier beings, AG and C demonstrate the capacity to move flexibly through experiences. They are not stuck in foreclosed ideas of who they are but welcome the multiple possibilities of experience that lie beneath assumed categories. AG narrates the myriad experiences that encompass her queer life, from love to the aspiration of marriage, from loss to experimentation. Demonstrating the interaction between her sexual and non-sexual experiences, AG articulates the social and individual subjectivities anchored to her experience of sex, love and intimacy. In AG's narration, queer life does not index a finite sexual identity, but, to use Nyanzi's (Reference Nyanzi and Matebeni2014: 63) phrasing, it provides ‘a canvas of possibilities’, where people are constantly being and becoming with creative capacities for change and in which things are never foreclosed.

Before we were called by their names: queer as queer(y)ing

By creatively living against and beyond the boundaries imposed by heteronormative institutions and global sexuality discourse, the women in SCMW query the assumed categories through which queer subjects are made known and knowable. The editors of this issue have argued for the intersection of queer and querying (i.e. queerying) as an analytical entry point into the production of queer knowledge (see Spronk and Nyeck Reference Spronk and Nyeck2021). This creative juxtaposition moves queer from what is already known and foreseeable into experiences that can only be revealed by committed inquiry into the everyday lives of those who negotiate non-normative desires. A major preoccupation of many of the narrators in SCMW is how discourses around sexuality are becoming fixed in ways that sometimes obscure the frontier navigations that have enabled queer life in Nigeria. Through laws such as the SSMPA that encode and criminalize fluid experiences in specific limiting ways, public discourse has also served to police the possibilities of intimacy and sexual life. Thus, queerying offers a way out of the assumptions that produce non-normative desires as the experiences of known and predetermined subjects.

Some contributors queery the emergent politics of naming and labelling sexual practices and reminisce about a past where there were no such names or when at least the names were different, when difference was not named in such a fixed and negative way. HA, for instance, narrates how accepting her mother was before 2014, when the bill was passed into law. DK, aged forty-two, notes: ‘Things have really changed on this issue since I was young. People weren't so religious back then’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 341). She reflects extensively on an earlier period when different practices were permissible or practised privately – a grandmother who married a girl in Ghana and took care of her, polygamous Agbole (extended family home) settings where the co-wives had queer relationships with one another. She adds: ‘They still have it here but it's changing. People are moving out of their compounds and becoming individuals. Now people have a really bad name for it’ (ibid.: 342). She bemoans the recent shift in modes of naming extant practice. More importantly, she recognizes the link between changing social realities and the emergent politics of naming. With a retrospective gaze on the fluid marital possibilities and ways of being together as a family that were more common and welcome in the past, DK demonstrates how it was precisely relationships such as polygamous ones that created enabling environments for queer experiences. The ‘bad name’ is thus an effect of the new landscapes of power and new political economies that are often linked to the forces of globalization and the production of modern citizens.

These stories suggest that reflecting on queer practice through experiences beyond the dominant linguistic economy of sexuality can help to critically queery the frontier of criminality that has been pushed by homophobic statist laws and religious institutions that see queer as criminal and evil. BM notes: ‘When we were young, it was not known as LGBTI. It was just known as they were the different people’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 226). The distinction between ‘LGBTI’ and ‘different people’ here is instructive. While the former seeks to identify people in specific ways, the latter retains the unknowability around the lives of the people it refers to by not attempting to capture what constitutes difference. Similarly, in another story, NT narrates how she moves back and forth between same-sex and heterosexual desire; she recognizes the two realities as ‘overlapping’, defining queer in her ability to ‘love more’, thereby expressing a broad and flexible idea of loving. NT also finds validation in her polygamous background and draws queer lessons from her father, who had two wives as is permissible under customary law in Nigeria. She notes: ‘I believe everyone can love many people during their lives. I have loved three people deeply and I can still love more. My father loved two women at the same time and that did not change anything in his life’ (ibid.: 324). She recognizes her father's capacity to love two people at the same time as an example of the polyamorous possibilities that are welcome in cultural and religious life in Nigeria. While polygamy is often critically examined in relation to female subordination and as an institution that, like many others, has produced the patriarchal environments that have contributed to the historical disadvantaging of women in various contexts, a few studies argue for the need to contextualize the practices of polygamy and explore the affordances that emerge beneath its other significations (Dauphin Reference Dauphin2013; Oyewumi Reference Oyewumi1997). Here, NT's juxtaposition of her father's polygamy with her experiences as a queer woman queries what is permitted in intimate life by Nigerian institutions. For her, a loving polygamous marriage represents the potential for love to be ‘more’ and breaks down the heteronormative assumptions of the law and society. ‘More’ becomes a marker for the potential non-fixity of intimate life in spite of the constraints in Nigeria, with people able to love in many different creative ways. Using her father's non-monogamous model – even if this is presumably patriarchal – she shows how this type of partnership can be read as queer, where queer expresses the open-ended possibilities of loving more. Additionally, she notes that this ‘did not change anything in his life’, again reflecting the idea that love and sexuality need not always be seen through the lens of identity but as lived experiences that do not fundamentally change who people are.

Creative arrangements that allow queer relations to subsist with heterosexual attachments are also narrated in these stories, queerying the assumptions of the dualism of homosexual versus heterosexual. These arrangements enable queer life beyond labels. BM, for instance, negotiates a complex relationship with her lover and her lover's husband. She notes: ‘My current girlfriend is married and her husband knows about us. I'm her first girlfriend. They have been married for five years. She was very depressed because they didn't have kids. We were friends, then stuff started happening. He noticed so he encouraged the relationship, this friendship … It works for all three of us’ (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 225). In this queer arrangement, like the old polygamous Agbole practices DK reminds us about where women married the same man so they could also be together, BM has found love with a woman and her understanding husband, who accepts the significance of his wife's relationship with a same-sex lover, forming a triangular bond of overlapping homosexual and heterosexual relations that makes them work as a single unit. The availability of multifaceted cohabitational and intimate forms in African socio-cultural settings resonates with the idea that African states have been negotiating with and accommodating ‘different forms of marriage arrangements, often guided by religious and customary procedures and logics’ (Nyeck Reference Nyeck2016: 95). In Nigeria, polygamous marriages are legal within the framework that Nyeck outlines of the negotiation between state and unexpected religio-cultural forms. NT's articulation of her father's polygamous life as a possible opening for queer thinking is therefore instructive in showing the fluid and ambiguous possibilities located in a socio-cultural world where marriage does not have to be monogamous.

Taking up queer through these everyday navigations and beyond paradigmatic modes of identification – the ‘bad name’, as DK (Mohammed et al. Reference Mohammed, Nagarajan and Aliyu2018: 342) put it – as these stories have shown, could thus have analytical and political merit. Taking up queer as queerying offers a way to elide the markings of anti-homosexuality laws in Africa as well as a fresh analytical entry point into thinking about and with queer experiences in Africa as reflected through local subjectivities beyond abstractions (Nyeck Reference Nyeck, Corrêa, de la Dehesa and Parker2014).

‘We need new names’: how to think with queer frontiers in Africa

If, as I have suggested, queer frontiers in Africa are marked by creative navigations of spaces and circumstances and reflect multiple experiences, how do we then study queer Africa along such a terrain of ambiguous emplacements and negotiations? How do we think with queer frontiers in Africa? While there is an immense amount of literature on queerness based on an LGBT+ framework, Macharia (Reference Macharia2016: 185) has argued that ‘the work of thinking through queer Africa will be mostly illegible to US and European ears trained by and embedded in LGBTI studies’. Therefore, it becomes imperative to explore new ways of knowing queer Africa that are not derived from limited Western epistemologies (Macharia Reference Macharia2016; Nyanzi Reference Nyanzi and Matebeni2014). As Nyamnjoh has argued:

Nyamnjoh reminds us quite articulately of the constant creative navigations people in Africa make to contest and negotiate the complex conditions of being that are available to them. These creative navigations are exemplified concretely in the stories of the queer women that SCMW compiles. These navigations are also unique in their own right and often cannot be adequately theorized through the lens of Western epistemological orders. In a similar vein, Neo Musangi (Reference Musangi and Matebeni2014) notes that, in eastern Kenya, the Akamba people call the thing that he is tala – a word that works more as a description of something one is than a name for the bearer of the description. Unlike the identitarian impulses of much Western queer discourse, tala indexes a descriptiveness that cannot be fixed in time and space. The point here is not to suggest that, in the semantic application of tala, violence or discrimination against queer bodies is erased. As Musangi (ibid.) shows in a discussion of rape and judgemental stares directed at queer bodies, the navigation of queer persons through contemporary African landscapes continues to be met with violence and prejudice that must be talked about. Rather, what the descriptive quality of tala offers is the possibility of engagement with African experiences as ‘malleable, amenable to being compressed, contorted and extended, dissected, dismembered and remembered, and branded’ (Nyamnjoh Reference Nyamnjoh2017: 257). In response to Musangi's provocation about living through descriptions rather than fixed essentialisms, Macharia (Reference Macharia2016: 184) has asked: ‘What demands would tala make on the concepts and histories in which queer studies is embedded? What would queer studies have to unlearn about its geo-histories to encounter tala on shared ground? What fluencies would queer studies have to give up to enter into conversation with tala?’ To ask these questions is to explore how we might think through and with the experiences of queer Africans. My adoption of the collective-indexing pronoun, we, throughout this section is intentional as well as strategic. By we, I mean to index a diverse and open-ended collective of people who, to adopt Macharia's phrasing, do the work of thinking through queer Africa. We scholars, editors, writers, activists, interlocutors – all of us who do that work.

The stories collected in SCMW demonstrate that many queer women in Nigeria negotiate their social and cultural environments in creative ways, where intimate life is always in conversation with other experiences of social and cultural life. Quite a few of the women live beyond the frame of LGBTI. Yet some, like VA, have found this language to be precisely the safe context needed for actualization. In the light of these paradoxes, how do we recognize queer frontiers in Africa? Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo (Reference Bulawayo2013) suggests in her novel title that We Need New Names. The reality of queerying narratives from Africa that project multiple modes of being and becoming and a variety of ways in which people experience intimate life suggests that perhaps we must tap into Bulawayo's creative vision for ‘new names’. New names would mean building on existing frames and developing unique new frames of intelligibility that articulate the current ambiguities of queer frontiers in Africa, without reducing them to nominal essentialisms. New names may be old names that were forgotten and submerged beneath the dominant ones. New names are the ones that queer Africans themselves suggest and appropriate, such as lola, tibi, lakiriboto, chokey, lifey and laudi in SCMW. New names are also global names operationalized for the uses of identification, but not as the ultimate frame. New names are the ones that recognize ‘the dynamic fluidity, movement and flux between and within sexualities, as well as the creative and enabling potential of individual African queers to mediate and move across sexual identities, partaking of diverse practices as they move along and between nodes on the continuum’ (Nyanzi Reference Nyanzi and Matebeni2014: 66). New names that work within the unfixed, flexible and fluid logic of JP's ‘or something’; that must be read ‘alongside gestures, silences, erasures, invisibilisation’ (ibid.: 67).

Texts, especially as they have emerged since the SSMPA, have played a critical role in projecting queer realities in Nigeria. Often, however, queer narratives remain on the margins in spite of the emergence of central texts – and sometimes because of it. How might we approach a language of thinking through queer Africa beyond the categories that tend to box it up? The question of language is particularly crucial in postcolonial African contexts, where language is often linguistically and symbolically removed from the everyday realities of the people it is deployed to define. As we have seen in this article, SCMW, in embedding multiple and diverse stories of queer women, demonstrates a variety of narratives about lives and experiences that cannot be extracted or read outside of their geographical and social conditions. It is in this social situatedness, I argue, that experiences of queer Africans can be read as open-ended, morphing into a combination of what they desire to be and what they must be to live their lives in their environments and contexts. This capacity to change in complex and unpredictable ways reflects the inherent non-fixity of African sexualities.